miso hungry? no fear! the eatery is here! established since 1983, the eatery quickly established itself as a cool place to hang out and eat innovative sushi. 'innovative sushi?' you say? yes! innovative! only at the eatery exists such as thing as a caterpillar roll, or a drunken monkey. or, if you're feeling more adventurous tonight, you can also try the tataki attack or the viva las vegas.

sushi and food aside, going to the eatery is more than just a sensory excursion for the tastebuds. be prepared to stare at the walls and ceilings because amazing art fills the joint from floor to ceiling. sit under the starlit clouds and watch the turtles and gnarly octopus swim by ... well, perhaps that would happen after the eighth or nineth tequila ...

in any case, the eatery rules!

i wondered, as i looked up, if a wind ... any wind ... could shake and rattle the bones together, as plastic as they are. and if the bones were shaked and rattled, that the creature would come to life out of within. or perhaps, it is just me who wants these creatures to climb off their suspending ropes and swim amongst us. in their majesty, some at forty-nine feet in length, it's hard not to feel small and insignficant ... and extremely fortunate to have shared the earth with such creatures, man-made or not. the construct of mother nature's children with the construct of man's invention is an expression of the artist as he collides two seemingly different commodities. underneath the gently swaying product of such a collision, one cannot help but wonder ... are we all doomed to be commodisized?

i know exactly how she feels. the mesmerizing effects of deities act in plays in my mind...they are all intertwined irregardless of skin color or costume origin. who knew how they got there...there being in my brain, of course...but i spent my childhood trying to figure them out as well.

in my mind, they all spoke the same language and abide by the same book of rules. book? what book? they knew what was right and what was wrong, but nothing was ever written down. it was the same instinct that lets me sleep well at night...or not. sometimes it's the same instinct that leads to the colourful language i think better expresses a person's feeling than what is confined to the dictionary of languages.

eve and the fire horse...eve and the fire horse...sometimes, eve, it's better to ride the horse...don't you think?

chasing the tequila can be a dangerous task on hand. for starters, one must remember to keep one's stance, for in the pursuit of 'tequila-ness', it can knock one off one's feet. in addition, one must also remember the right ingredients to chase the tequila with. things have a way of going really really wrong when the wrong chasers are paired with the queen of tequila. on such a night as this, the chasing was done with the corona. in hindsight, chasing tequilas with coronas seem as innocuous as our good friend, the long island iced tea...

...'why...it's just a long island iced tea...what could possibly go wrong?'

such were our famous last words as we stumbled into the night...

it stood in centre stage, basking in the spotlight of a million bulbs, getting ready to be the voice of the concerto it would soon be part of that night. born to an italian musician, bartolomeo cristofori of florence called it a gravicèmbalo con piano e forte. why he built it, no one will ever know for sure, but the beauty of the felt in contact with steel strings...who would have known?

well, there was ever a true appreciator of the pianoforte, it would have to be matthijs eterman. beginning his career as an apprentice in a piano shop in his native netherlands, matthijs was the hey you sent on errands that involved anything but the tuning of pianos. he was graduated to doing errands in the shop in a matter of two months. two months became a lifetime of learning with the piano.

to know a piano truly, inside and out, takes more than the mere ability to dismantle it. the true appreciation of what a pianoforte is capable of means that you not only have to know of its parts in intimate detail, you also had to know what happens when those parts were struck in the manners that produced the piano's voice. the ability to play and the ability to cure go together hand in hand as naturally as the ivory lies next to the ebony. without one there is no other...

ebony and ivory
go together in perfect harmony
side by side together on my piano keyboard
why don't we?...

as the wedding day approaches, many couples and their immediately-involved families sometimes forget to celebrate the joy of marriage...but not the dattas! this family loves to party and they do that oh-so-very-well! from the cooking in the wee hours in the morning, to the beautiful fabrics cascading from the ceiling to the walls, the dattas had not only set the bar for the essence of life's celebrations - they have raised it to the quintessential meaning of the word celebration. ron and naleem, parents of the groom, welcomed the bride-to-be and her family with open arms. flown in from norway, the bride and her family were invited with open arms into the whirling and twirling world of datta celebration. music fuelled the women's energy on the dance floor, and the drums only added to the passion each woman brought with her that day. with each drum beat, another woman would take the place of another, and this exchange of energy was duplicated in an adjoining room where the art of mehndi was applied.

customary prior to the wedding day, the women gather for a day of celebration that is entirely their own. henna would be applied onto their hands, inside and outside and sometimes even up their arms. after the intricate patterns are carefully laid onto each woman's hands, they are expected to rest and relax from the daily chores that the women usually do, for the henna has to dry in order for its dye to soak into their skins, and only time would ensure the proper transferance from dye to skin. as such, the henna ceremonies give the women the chance to rest and the men the opportunity to prove their worth to their wives and families, a truly all-encompassing way of involving everyone in the intricacies of a wedding!

did you know that april was sacred to venus, the festum veneris et forunae virilis being held on the first day, and thus it was suggested that aprilis was originally her month aphrilis, from her greek name aphrodite?

hm. thoughts to ponder.

as such are these:

the anglo-saxons called april oster-monath, the period sacred to the pagan saxon, goddess of spring, whose name is derived from the modern easter. st. george's day is the twenty-third of the month; st. mark's eve, with its superstition that the ghosts of those who are doomed to die within the year will be seen to pass through the church, falls on the twenty-fourth. in china, the symbolical ploughing of the earth by the emporer and princes of the blood takes place in their third month, which frequently corresponds to april in the roman calendar; and in japan, the festival of dolls is celebrated in the same month.

but most importantly...april starts off with a bang with april fools' day! originally a new year's celebration in the fifteen-hundreds in france, many people were fooled into continuing to celebrate it as a new year even when the king decreed new year's day to be moved to january the first. these backward folk were labelled as fools by the general populace, and were subjected to some ridicule, often sent on fools errands or were made the butt of other practical jokes.

and the tradition of harassment evolved over time, as human nature does, into the tradition of prank-playing on the first day of april. it eventually spread to england and scotland in the eighteenth century, before being introduced to the american colonies of both the english and the french.

the mexicans, however, celebrate their april fool's day on december the twenty-eighth, with the day of pranks originally being a day of sad remembrance of the slaughter of innocent children by king herod. it eventually turned into a lighter commemoration involving pranks and trickery (don't ask me how...dead children...pranks...you get the connection!)

and...just for another series of pondering...whether you'd want to take this blog entry for real is entirely up to you. you might end up being the fool, this april fools' day! ;^)